A Comparison of Title IX at Uh Manoa and the Mountain West Conference Essay

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college athletic programs in America are out of control. The excessive budgets of athletic programs make many large state universities appear like sports teams with a few tenured professors hanging around irrelevantly. The demands of athletic programs are so excessive that if they were professional, they would violate labor laws, and student athletes at Northwestern University have engaged in an abortive effort to unionize. There is very little procedurally that holds back these excesses, but one of the few things that does try to guarantee some sense of moderation and equity is the government's Title IX mandate. Title IX applies only to state-funded schools, because it is part of a governmental education mandate, but in practice this includes almost all schools in America because of the way that federal funding is disbursed even at institutions where the government is not the primary funder -- in all of these institutions Title IX is in place to ensure gender equality (Guide to Title IX, 2009). It is worth recalling how necessary such legal safeguards are -- it is not yet fifty years since many major American educational institutions (for example Yale or Princeton) even started admitting female undergraduates. Title IX, made into law in 1972, is itself not yet fifty years old, but it was legislated in order to reflect the changing educational and workplace environment of the nineteen-sixties, in which full equality for women (who, it must be remembered, had only received the right to vote earlier in the century with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment) would be enforceable under the law in certain ways. Title IX is just one portion of the Education Amendments of 1972, and it serves to ensure equality for women in athletic programs at state-funded colleges and universities, but this is not its only or primary purpose (titleix.info, 2015). Instead Title IX exists to prohibit sex discrimination or sexual harassment across the board in universities (Guide to Title IX, 2009). But one of the easiest ways to examine Title IX at an institution like the University of Hawaii at Manoa is through its effects on college athletics.

Title IX compliance is measured by a "three prong test." In terms of overall student athlete participation, an institution can either demonstrate that it has athletic participation opportunities that are proportional, gender-wise, to the academic enrollment as a whole (first prong); or it can demonstrate that it is continually expanding the athletic opportunities for the less-represented gender, which is almost invariably women (second prong); or it can fully accommodate the less-represented gender to match the actual interests evinced by that gender (third prong) ("Title IX: The Three Prong Test," 2012). In practice this means that a school like the University of Hawaii at Manoa -- which has a larger female enrollment than male enrollment in the student body -- will probably avoid the first prong. The third prong is perhaps the easiest way for any school to comply, and is responsible for the overall disparity that we can see in terms of actual expenditure. Every school finds student interest in having a male football team -- not every school finds student interest in having a women's water polo team.

But in terms of actual dollar amounts spent on men's and women's sports, the Mountain West Conference does not have a particularly equitable record. In terms of total expenses by team, the Mountain West Conference schools spend 167 million on men's athletic teams but only 84 million on women's athletic teams. In other words, two dollars are spent on men for every one dollar that is spent on women (OPE Cutting Tool, 2015). In this regard the University of Hawaii at Manoa compares much more favorably and equitably by the standards imposed under Title IX. Total expenses on men's athletic teams at the University of Hawaii at Manoa come to 17.8 million, while the total expenses on women's athletic teams come to 10.3 million. This is a ratio more like every $1.80 being spent on men's athletic teams entails a dollar being spent on women's athletic teams. While this is by no means equality in expenditure, it is more favorable than the 2:1 ratio that is the overall rule in the Mountain West Conference. And because the data from the Mountain West Conference is averaged out from all the colleges and universities within the Mountain West Conference, this means that if the University of Hawaii at Manoa is more equitable than the 2:1 overall ratio, there must be colleges and universities that are even less equitable in their own individual expenditures than the overall average (OPE Cutting Tool, 2015).

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The sense that the University of Hawaii at Manoa compares favorably in terms of Title IX compliance to the Mountain West Conference as a whole is confirmed by other data as well. To take the example of head coaches' salaries, in 2014 the average head coach salary in the Mountain West Conference was 362,944 dollars for the head coach of a men's athletic team, compared to 110,852 thousand dollars for the head coach of a women's athletic team. This is again a broad disparity, with the head coaches of men's athletic teams making on average over 3 times what the head coaches of women's athletic teams make. At the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the gap in income disparity is still present but is much smaller proportionally: for 2014, the average men's athletics coach at the University of Hawaii at Manoa makes 222,088 dollars while the average women's athletics coach at the University of Hawaii at Manoa makes 102,320 dollars (OPE Cutting Tool, 2015). Likewise we can look at the different amounts being spent on men and women for athletically-related student aid. Ignoring the larger question of why academic institutions are spending this kind of money on recruiting students who are distinguished for something non-academic, we can nevertheless note this is an issue that impacts the lives of students so directly -- and which is likely to prompt discrimination lawsuits so readily -- that the Mountain West Conference actually has something approaching an equitable record. Overall, in the Mountain West Conference, around 38 million dollars is spent on athletically-related student aid for men, and around 31 million dollars is spent on athletically-related student aid for women -- this is not quite 50-50, but is quite close at approximately 55-45 in favor of male student athletes. And in this category, we find that the University of Hawaii at Manoa is absolutely typical for the Mountain West Conference, in spending in 2014 approximately 4.6 million on athletically-related student aid for men, but spending approximately 3.8 million on athletically-related student aid for women -- again a proportion of about 55-45 in favor of male student athletes. The more rigorous compliance in this particular area of expenditure is surely due to the threat of lawsuits, especially when college tuition has become as outlandishly overpriced as it is in the 2015 "education bubble" economy. An additional statistic that matches this more equitable spread at the University of Hawaii at Manoa can be found in athletic recruitment expenses -- for men's teams in 2014, the University of Hawaii at Manoa spent 286,743 on recruitment, and spent 265,412 on recruitment for women's teams. This is remarkably equitable compared with the overall figures for the Mountain West Conference, which again exhibit a ratio slightly more imbalanced towards men than 2:1 -- the Mountain West Conference sees 4.877 million dollars being spent on recruitment for male athletes compared to 2.224 million dollars being spent on recruitment for female athletes. The relative equity -- closer to 1:1 than 2:1 in ratio -- which is seen at the University of Hawaii at Manoa is obviously due to the fact that this is a state-run institution, and thus more susceptible to discrimination lawsuits by students who are, because of gender, not the beneficiary of equitable recruitment budgets.

In other arenas, however, the University of Hawaii at Manoa does exhibit something of a serious disparity. Let us take the issue of Game Day Expenses, in other words the operating expenses in the athletics budget which cover every aspect of the actual athletic contests that are at the heart of student athletics. In the Mountain West Conference, the total spent on Game Day Expenses was 40.9 million dollars for men's athletics teams, while 18.8 million dollars was spent on Game Day Expenses for the women's athletics teams. Over 2 dollars is spent on men here for every women's dollar in the Mountain West Conference. At the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the relevant figures for Game Day Expenses show a total 2014 expenditure of 4.25 million for men's athletic teams with a 2.38 million expenditure for the women's athletics teams. If the Mountain West Conference shows an overall ratio that is slightly more lopsided in men's favor than 2:1, the University of Hawaii at Manoa shows a ratio that is only slightly less lopsided in men's favor than 2:1. It is.....

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